


freedom's in the fighting

by hellebored



Series: freedom's in the fighting [1]
Category: Helix (TV)
Genre: Consensual Sex, F/M, PTSD, aggressively happy endings, babyfic with very little baby content, mentions of canonical sexual abuse, mentions of torture, out of chronological order, season 1 canon-compliant, season 2 canon-divergent
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-02
Updated: 2017-10-02
Packaged: 2019-01-08 02:20:46
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,675
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12245175
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hellebored/pseuds/hellebored
Summary: “You know I know how to kill you,” she says in a heated whisper, possibly afraid that a block away from the psychologist’s office is a bad place toloudlythreaten her partner with murder.“You have two years, I have twenty,” he taunts, arching a condescending brow. “I like my odds.”“Yeah? I kicked your ass twice the week we met, and that wasbeforeI had your shitty-ass employer kidnapping me into their assassination club.”(Or: Anana and Sergio ditch Ilaria and un-steal their baby.)Now with art!





	freedom's in the fighting

**Author's Note:**

> For the sake of continuity this pushes out the timeline for season 2 by about 8-10 months.
> 
> [oldstupidtemplar](http://oldstupidtemplar.tumblr.com) made accompanying art (fair warning: like this story, there's some NSFW) at my request, as one does for a story in a fandom of like five people, and oh man. Oh boy. I hope you love them as much as I do.

_Boston_  
_Three weeks post-St. Germain_

They take it to court.

There are easier ways; Sergio knows that first-hand. It’s not difficult to make someone disappear, and children are even easier, especially ones that look like you. This one has his hair. Her small hands, pressed against the paler underside of his wrist, are the same shade of brown.

Sunlight starts to fade through the shutters. He glances at the clock: they don’t have a lot of time left, maybe fifteen minutes. He could push it to twenty, but the shitty, unfair truth is five more minutes, even _these_ five minutes, aren’t worth the risk.

Anana tightens her hands around the sleepy girl’s back, toying with her hair, and he can see the moment she nearly changes her mind.

“You don’t have to do this," he says, shaking his head. “We can all go, right now.”

If he were alone he’d take the child without a shred of remorse, because if there’s one time in this world, one time stealing somebody’s kid from the crib seems morally acceptable and right it’s when it’s _yours_.

A light curves through the window, bright and sharp. _Shit, they’re early-_

His eyes snap to Anana’s to find she’s already put the girl back in the crib, face gone blank. She’s a good soldier: once the tears dry there won’t be any evidence of the cracks in her impassive mask.

They slip out the bedroom window, silently replacing the screen, and they’re on the sidewalk by the time a key turns in the front door.

—

 _Philadelphia_  
_Four months pre-St. Germain_

He dreams of fire, twisted metal, and gasoline.

 _I can’t get to you_ , he hears someone say: _you’ll have to cut yourself out_ , the voice adds, and he feels something sharp knock against his blood-slick palm. A knife: it slips as he grips it — he thinks he might be cutting himself — but he holds it tight against the seatbelt and saws back and forth until it gives and he falls hard on his shoulders, head slamming into the roof of the car.

 _Get up_.

 _Get up, goddammit,_ the voice is saying, as if swearing will make its proposition more persuasive. _If you die in there you’re killing me too and I didn’t do all of this just to go to hell, get up, get_ up-

Hot, dark waves of smoke start to billow into the car, followed by an explosion close enough to make his ears ring. His eyes burn: through the shattered window on the passenger side there’s a hand, reaching. He turns his body and crawls toward it, crawls over glass and scraps of what he realizes is another person, until his fingers brush against his rescuer’s.

Suddenly he’s being tugged out over the glass, over the remains of the passenger seat and its passenger, up onto a sidewalk. His head feels too heavy for his neck. Dimly he hears panting, probably from his rescuer. He’s still being dragged: through an alley, judging by piles of sour-smelling trash and the thick waves of music leaking out of the closed back door of a nightclub.

Cooler, cleaner-smelling air fills his mouth as the tight alley opens up into a quiet side street. The person carrying him lets him drop to the ground and he lies there listening to the sound of a car door opening, and then he’s being lifted again: this time it’s from the front, and he knows that face-

“ _Anana_? What the _hell_ -”

“Jesus, Sergio. When’d you get so fucking _heavy_?”

This is _wrong_. They’d showed him video of her tied up in a cell just last week.

She pushes him back into the seat and clips his seatbelt on. “I’d say you’re welcome for saving your dumb ass. But I sorta caused it, so maybe sorry’s more appropriate.”

Something’s starting to click into place, something about the videos, about the last fifteen months of hedged questions and demands, and whatever it is is leaving him feeling pretty fucking _queasy_.

As she slides into the driver’s seat beside him, he tries to speak and coughs on the words. “You work for them,” he manages.

She turns the key in the ignition. “And you’re bleeding all over my car. Maybe we can save the Q and A until we get the hell out of here? Unless you wanna wait around for the cops.”

It's a funny thing to hear from somebody who used to wear a badge. Sergio shrugs, or thinks he does, but truthfully he’s not sure about any of his body or what it’s doing. He lets his head fall back against the seat and closes his eyes.

“Don’t you dare, asshole." Her palm smacks hard against his left shoulder. “Eyes open.”

It’s a long ten-minute drive to the safe obscurity of a motel.

—

 _Boston_  
_Two months post-St. Germain_

“I got a call from Julia,” Anana says as she brushes out her hair and puts it back into a bun. She never puts her hair up, not anymore, but she’d worn it that way plenty while they were both on St. Germain.

“Should I be jealous?”

Anana rolls her eyes and finishes buttoning up a blue silk blouse that says _money_. “She’s got an arrangement with the judge, and something about assembling evidence she claims will sway the law guardian. Unless the rest of her _friends_ want to screw with us one last time, we shouldn’t have a problem.”

When she reaches her hands behind her neck, Sergio steps forward to fasten her necklace. He'd like to think Ilaria’s currently too busy mass-manufacturing worldwide sterilization, but it'd be idiotic to dismiss the single-minded pettiness of people who quite possibly started the Spanish Inquisition.

If this goes south, if Anana’s way doesn’t work, there’s always his.

—

 _Philadelphia_  
_Four months pre-St. Germain_

He sits in a grimy motel bathtub in his underwear while Anana straddles a chair next to him and picks debris from his arms and face. Everything throbs. He blinks away a trickle of blood and tries yet again to grasp the current situation, starting with her.

“Tell me you weren’t working for them all along.”

“I realize you've gotta ask, but do _you_ realize it's a stupid question?” Fingers hold his chin steady while she digs at his jaw with a tweezers. “Why am I always cleaning up your mess?”

“I thought you said this was _your_ mess,” he points out through clenched teeth, wincing at the sharp twinge as she tugs a shard of something out of his skin. “They told me you were…”

“Dead?”

“Detained,” he says tightly. _Better to be dead._

“Seems like they were feeding us different lines of bullshit. I thought you’d been killed. I was working for them almost a year before I learned the truth.”

Anana turns his head a little roughly and swabs at a bloody clot of hair behind his right ear. He grimaces; it feels like there’s still a piece of something searingly sharp where she’s pressing the washcloth.

“Care to explain your little _accident_?”

“Tripped the light at the intersection. I’ve been tailing your route for a couple days.” She sighs. “Sorry about the man you were with.”

“He wasn’t important,” Sergio says bluntly, “but I'd love to hear how you knew I wouldn’t end up like him.”

“That’s why I chose a t-intersection instead of a four-way. Easier to control which side of the car gets hit.”

Sergio stares at her. She makes it sound so matter-of-fact, like maybe she crashes cars for a living, and, hell. She might.

“You ever heard of calling people? With a phone?”

Anana snorts. “The phone Ilaria uses to contact you, that phone? Think I’ll pass on listening to recordings of our conversations played back at my next _quarterly review._ ”

As she cards through his hair with a comb for any remaining shards of glass, they slip into raw-edged silence.

“What happened to you?” He keeps his voice carefully neutral. She's never struck him as the type to tolerate pity.

She gives a small, bitter shrug. “You know what happened.”

Sergio has a pretty good idea. What he doesn't know is what happened _after_. “No I don’t,” he says, looking up at her from under raised brows. “The Anana I knew? She would never work for Ilaria, not unless they _had_ something on her.”

Anana exhales a short mirthless laugh.

“You really don't know?”

Pulling her phone from a back pocket, she hands over a video of a blonde, sweet-sounding woman holding a black-haired baby.

He looks at the infant’s thick lashes and chubby limbs paddling the air. Suddenly his throat feels painfully dry. _This_ is why she’d risked killing him in a car accident just to isolate him from Ilaria’s oversight. He feels it, a sick emptiness swallowing the space around his lungs, stealing his ability to breathe. It's hers.

It's _his_.

Of all the things he'd murmured against the curve of her neck in warmth and darkness, he'd been so careful not to make declarations. No promises, nothing to tie her to the ghost of him once he’d left: nothing like this, worse than anything he could’ve _said_. Nothing that would damn her no matter how much distance he put between them.

Anana rises from the chair. Silently she balls up the bloody towel and bandages and tosses them in the trash. In the harsh, cheap light she looks haggard.

“I thought about getting an abortion. You know why I didn’t? After thirty years... she was the first one who was gonna be _safe_. The first _nobody_ would take away.”

When she leaves the bathroom Sergio stays behind and stares at his hands. There's blood seeping from his palm again, turning the bandages red.

—

 _Boston_  
_Two months post-St. Germain_

For a week or two the local news loves it: the story of a trafficked woman separated from her baby, fraudulent visa papers, a heartbroken, innocent couple who’d just wanted to adopt. The only reason it gains traction with the press in the first place is because the couple who’d adopted are white Americans; a missing Inuk woman with a stolen baby hardly rates American news.

“Was the attorney part of your favor?” Sergio asks Julia when she shows up to the hearing. He stands at the back of the room waiting until the court’s called to session. Julia leans against the wall beside him, elegant arms crossed.

She raises a brow. “Frankenthal? He’s my employer covering their ass.”

“Covering their ass must've meant something different when I was working for them. Little more _violent_.”

He knows the violence is still there: now it's just on a deeper level. They’ve sent an attorney who can polish the truth into something Ilaria finds palatable, who can remind him and Anana, again, what mercy looks like, and whose presence can serve as a thinly-veiled threat of what their lives might be like if mercy were to be _removed_.

Ilaria’s not on trial, and they intend to keep it that way.

Julia’s take is somewhat more optimistic. “As far as they’re concerned, this is all just a way for their attorney to win an easy case. They’re not monsters _all_ the time, Sergio." He wonders if she realizes the only time she doesn't say _we_ is when she's attempting to distance herself from their sins.

“Nothing like hiring out your dirty work to keep your own hands clean,” he remarks sardonically, and Julia shakes her head, gazing at him with fond eyes.

“You always did care too much. It says so in your file.”

He shoots her a look he’s pretty sure communicates how utterly full of bullshit she is, judging by the way she’s grinning.

“You should _really_ work on not reading between the lines.”

Julia snorts. “Why? Afraid I'll accuse you of being a good person? You’re the one _voluntarily_ trying to gain custody of a two-year-old.”

—

 _Philadelphia_  
_Four months pre-St. Germain_

When he emerges from the bathroom Anana tosses him a clean set of clothes, and then peers out the side of the shuttered windows while he struggles to pull a shirt over his head with stiff, bruised fingers.

Sergio waits until she turns from the window. “I'm sorry. For getting you into this mess.”

Anana folds her arms. She looks thinner, all sharp edges in the lightweight top she's wearing in spite of a brisk early spring. She compresses her lips into a tight line. “I didn't do all of this for an apology, but frankly? You _owe_ me for the last two years. Help me find her and we call it even.”

 _Call it even,_ as if he'll be able to go back to work like nothing's happened. He doesn't believe for a second she'll stop at finding the baby — there's no way this ends without an interrogation and possibly deactivation. His professional opinion is her odds are complete _shit_ and the longer they share the same air, his won't be much better.

“You're going to get yourself killed,” he says flatly.

Anana meets his eyes without flinching. “You say that like I'm not already dead. This isn't _living,_ Sergio.”

Sergio looks at the floor, jaw clenched. He can't make an argument against that in a dingy room filled with the pervasive, filthy scent of old sex and cigarettes, like the reception area to hell.

He wonders why his superiors bothered taunting him with some lie about locking her up in iso. Seeing her like this, closed off and barely keeping her shit together, would've been equally _motivational_. Knowing he has a _child_ would've been -

_Don't._

“I'll do what I can,” he says at last.

Some of the hardness eases from her features. “That's all I'm asking.”

Everything he has, his life, won't be enough to get her what she wants.

—

 _Boston_  
_Two months post-St. Germain_

The couple presents an impassioned plea during the hearing. They've raised _Stephanie_ since she was three months old. They show a recording of the first time Stephanie walked, a recording Anana watches with fixed eyes. Maybe she's seen it before, sent to her phone as the stakes for some mission, dangled like a prize she knew damn well was a lie.

The couple’s attorney presents a statement written by the woman, Karen: _We feel deeply for Ms. Ashoona, but we beg her to consider the effect this will have on our family. Stephanie already knows us as mommy and daddy. Please, don't take the child we've loved and raised as our own the way your child was taken from you._

Anana’s response takes on a defiant edge. “This _is_ the child who was taken from me. Just to be clear on that. She was stolen while I was still in a hospital bed.”

He remembers the way she’d reacted to what they’d found under the abbey on St. Germain, how her entire body had flinched from the sight of those women restrained in their own filth.

Until St. Germain it hadn’t occurred to him to wonder exactly how Ilaria must’ve treated her during her pregnancy; now the sight of Anana’s ashen face blurs together in his memory with women strung up like something from a torture room. He might be the only person present at this hearing who has a sense of what she means by _hospital bed._

As Sergio listens to Frankenthal recite a scrubbed version of the last two years of Anana's life, he thinks of the night she’d stood in a stranger’s nursery, balancing two versions of their futures in her hands, and decided to go to court instead.

If that’s not enough of a reason for him to want to slip a knife between their sheltered suburban ribs for every veiled insinuation their attorney makes about Anana's selfishness, he’s not sure what _would_ be.

—

 _Singapore_  
_Three months pre-St. Germain_

When he gets her the address for the couple who adopted their baby, she turns the folded paper over and over in her hand until the ink starts to smudge.

“Thank you,” she says quietly. She looks up at him briefly, lips pressed together, eyes damp. “I guess this means we're even.”

He knows that's an out and the sane thing would be to take it. He’s got plenty of proof for how well this _won't_ go. Maybe Anana's right to call things even and minimize their risk.

“Even with you, maybe,” he hears himself saying, and he's not sure what the hell he thinks he's doing. This is foolish. It's _massively_ fucking unwise, and — “I don't think I'm even with her.”

A flash of surprise slips across her face, and then her hand tightens around the piece of paper. “I know how this ends. I just want a little time with her first.”

She's tired. It's in the curve of her shoulders, in her voice. Ilaria wrings everything out of the disposable ones and discards them when they're empty, and she wasn't _meant_ for this.

If she's intent on throwing herself on that pyre, the least he can do is be there this time.

“I'll make sure you get it,” he says.

—

 _Boston_  
_Two months post-St. Germain_

As part of the hearing they bring in character witnesses. Tulok flies down from the north.

Anana had called him as soon as she'd been officially removed from the corporate payroll; they've used video calls ever since, whenever Tulok’s had internet. Sometimes when the two of them are talking Sergio hears her laughter through the bedroom wall, and it loosens something tight inside his chest and makes him swim in guilt at the same time. There's pieces of her nobody's managed to break, not Ilaria, not him.

 _Give it a few years,_ a shitty part of him says, because he's bound to fuck it up at some point and break _something_.

When they pick up Tulok at the airport from a redeye flight, he looks older; in spite of being two years younger than Anana, there's grey starting to pepper his hair. He hoists Anana into the air just like the first time Sergio had seen them together, squeezing her tightly until she bats him on the shoulder and demands to be let go.

Tulok puts her down and says something to her in Inuktitut. She hugs him again, feet planted firmly on the floor this time, arms as far around his stout waist as she can reach.

Sergio stands a few feet away, uncomfortably aware he's witnessing something personal. Instead, he watches travelers as they go up and down the escalators, carrying the baggage of their lives from one place to the next, until the sea of shapes becomes a blur.

He flinches, startled, when Anana's hand settles on his elbow. Instead of pulling away she presses into the touch, her thumb rubbing circles along the inner curve of his bicep.

“Hey, tough guy." She peers up at him intently with thoughtful eyes. He focuses on the sound of her voice, grounding, _warm_. “We better go before my brother collapses under that duffel bag and I’m forced to carry him. Why the hell do you have so much luggage, Tulok?”

Tulok shrugs and mutters about the _weather being weird this far south,_ which probably means he's packed most of his light clothing in the hopes that _something_ will work in a sweltering seventy-five degrees. Adjusting the bag on his shoulder, he turns the stony weight of his gaze toward Sergio.

Anana moves in between them, just a fraction. “I love this man, so _be nice._ ”

Sergio's eyes prick: it's the first time he's heard her say it in front of someone else. He clenches his jaw tight and concentrates on that, because he's suddenly realized he's _tired_ , too tired not to lose it in the middle of the airport if he's not careful.

Anana will tense at a backfiring car, at a stranger open-carrying on the street. She cuts her own hair because after sitting in a parlor with a pair of scissors near her face, she'd had to call a taxi, unable to drive from the shaking.

They've both got something. There are cracks in his life where _normal_ should go: places where suitable emotions get substituted by nothing, and for some reason it's becoming harder and harder to fake.

It’s not the emotions he's been faking.

 _Let's get you home,_ Anana says, and takes his hand.

—

 _Chicago_  
_Two months pre-St. Germain_

They meet using dates and times texted to burner phones. At first it’s little more than discreet deliveries of memos and emails or records from different adoption agencies, but after months of that, of drop locations and brushing past each other on the street, he gets a text with a date and room number for a hotel in Chicago.

He has business in New York and arranges an eleven-hour layover at O’Hare. When he gets to the hotel room Anana’s already inside; she pulls him into the dark hall and shuts the door by pressing his weight against it.

He laughs quietly. “So this _is_ a booty call. Glad I dressed appropriately.”

“I don’t give a damn how you’re _dressed_ ,” she says, leaning up to his lips; he feels her fingers at the back of his head tugging him closer until her mouth settles hot and insistent against his.

He slides his hands down her back and grasps her ass, rocking her hips against his until her sounds change from murmurs of encouragement into soft-edged panting. She's managed to shove both her hands inside his shirt and lifted it halfway up his chest.

“I'm personally okay with fucking in the hallway,” he says, distracted by the sensation of her open-mouthed progress along his jaw, “but I assume this place comes with a bed-”

She changes direction with her hands and slips one south under the band of his pants, and the words stop.

“See what you meant by dressing appropriately." She chuckles as he groans and drops his head back against the wall. “Always been an undies kinda gal myself. I find it reduces chafing.”

“Chafing’s not always a bad thing,” he manages in a broken tumble of words, while her fingers curl around his cock.

He opens his eyes in the middle of the haze to see she's rubbing herself through her slacks with her free hand, small bruised noises coming from the back of her mouth.

“Fuck this,” he says, pushing down her pants, and then: “I thought you said something about underwear-”

“ _Special occasion-_ ”

He swivels her around against the door and lifts her enough to drive himself into her, groaning roughly when she cries out and digs her fingers into his shoulders, _fuck, Sergio, oh fuck-_

He feels her muscles tighten for a long sweet moment and then release, thighs shaking against his waist.

It's enough, if this is all there is. It's enough.

He realizes exactly what that means about the time he comes, and it's as good a moment as any to discover that he's well and truly fucked.

—

 _Boston_  
_Three months post-St. Germain_

“What was your mother's name?” Anana asks him while they're in the car, headed to the courthouse. They've both decided there's no way any child of theirs will be named _Stephanie._

“Cíntia,” Sergio says, after a long reluctant pause, as if he's staring at a door he doesn't want to open. “Cíntia Ines.” He swallows abruptly, eyes fixed on the road. “Yours?”

Sergio glances at her from the corner of his eye, half-expecting her to pry further into his family life and grateful beyond words when she lets it drop. He can't remember the middle names of his siblings, his youngest sister's face, whether his father had brown eyes or hazel like his.

Instead, Anana leans back in her seat with a thoughtful expression, eyes on memories that apparently aren't quite so painful.

“My grandparents lived during a time where it wasn't very popular to give your kids Inuit names, so her birth certificate said _Edith_.” She shakes her head. “Father called her Atuat. That's how I knew her.”

“Atuat,” he says, and then he surprises himself when the words slip out in a half-voiced murmur, _Atuat Ines_. He sees his mother in his mind's eye, dark eyebrows and dark eyes, lovely, lost. It doesn't hurt as much as he would've thought.

A smile blooms across Anana's face. “Atuat Ines,” she repeats, and reaches across the space between their seats to slip her hand behind his shoulder.

—

 _Paris_  
_One day pre-St. Germain_

The day after Julia's snubbed for a Board meeting, Sergio watches her pace by her desk, her clear-cut intensity edged with a layer of desperation nobody in their right mind would blame her for. Her arms spread in a hopeless gesture. “The Board won't listen to me. If Ilaria releases Narvik C…”

Clearly the _Board's_ not in their right mind anymore, if they ever were, and he has some real fucking doubts.

Sergio has seen a lot of shit. He's seen dead people, dead families, dead villages: but the vector capabilities of Narvik B combined with the utter annihilation of Narvik A could wipe out an entire _continent_ in three months. If Ilaria thinks they can control this they're _insane_. This is full-scale genocide, the death of the human race.

He might have a better idea than most exactly what that will look like. What desperate situations do to people, and what it means for the ones not willing or capable of reacting to violence with whatever's in arm's reach.

“Sergio?” Julia says. “You okay?”

He brushes it off with a small shake of the head. “Sorry. This possible solution on St. Germain. You have a plan?”

There's a knock on the door; Sergio tenses, but Julia moves toward it with a confident step, heels clicking smartly on the wooden floor. “I do.”

She lets the door swing open for someone he knows, small and dark-haired and, from the look of it, _extremely_ jetlagged. “I tracked down a friend of yours. Somebody you said I could trust.”

Sergio breathes in sharply. He has to forcibly remind himself that Anana has as much of a reason to be within a block of Ilaria headquarters as he does. There's subtle signs, not the least of which is the hard edge of a gun he can just barely see at her side when she unzips her leather jacket.

“Hey." Anana shrugs out of her jacket as she crosses the room toward him. She looks down the length of him and then back up, slowly, obviously more accustomed to his street clothing, and smirks. “Nice suit."

“I thought you didn't care what I'm wearing,” he says in a low tone that's not meant to carry, and Anana grins, a soft blush creeping across her cheeks that he'd love to draw attention to with the pressure of his mouth.

“I want to remind you both of the risk,” Julia says, drawing back his focus. “If things go south... you know what Ilaria does to traitors.”

Anana rests her hands on her hips, thumbs curling against her belt. “Things go south, we’re all dead anyway. You keep your promise, we'll keep ours.”

Sergio narrows his eyes. He's never refused to help with any of Julia's plans; that doesn't mean he makes a habit of promising some outcome without knowing what he's agreed to.

“What do you mean, _ours_?”

“Agreement by proxy,” Anana says dryly. “We help her with this, she’ll get us _out_. That's the deal.”

It takes him a few seconds to process that, what it _means_. There’s no expiration date to the contracts Ilaria makes; no retirement plan for a job where less than five percent make it past forty-five.

His eyes snap up to Julia's. “You're _sure_. The people I work for, they're a separate group. You may be on the Board, but that’s no guarantee you’ve got any authority-”

“I _own_ the people you work for,” Julia says testily. “As for the Board — even if they decide to stonewall me over something this petty, whatever’s on that island should be worth a few small favors.”

Sergio looks at Anana, who hasn't moved an inch except to roll up her sleeves from the heat of Julia's apartment. She raises her chin. He's seen that look on men backed up against a wall with a gun aimed at their heads: most times he's been the one pulling the trigger. In the end some people aren't afraid, just angry.

Anana sighs, face bitter and weary. “We're handing a eugenics program to a bunch of rich assholes who live forever, but I’ll take it over the alternative. It'll buy some time. That's _something_.”

For years he's suppressed his own moral compass to the point he hardly recognizes it. Hers is good enough.

“Tell us what you need us to do,” he says to Julia, and slips his hand around Anana's.

—

 _Boston_  
_Three months post-St. Germain_

The judge, an older woman who wears a bored and cool expression like it's part of the official judiciary outfit, requests all parties involved submit to a psychological evaluation. It’s standard procedure: that doesn’t do much to reassure Anana, who paces their kitchen the night before, all pent-up energy and too distracted to notice before the noodles boil over.

Sergio turns off the stove and steers her over to a chair at the table. He points out she’s been trained to withstand torture, and this is just a psych eval, and not even by someone who’s trying to _break_ something in her.

“Sure,” she grouses. “Knowing how to keep my mouth shut when some asshole’s prodding me with a picana is exactly the same as proving I’m a stable, normal person. What stable, normal person even knows what a picana _is_?”

“Probably one who knows better than to say she’s been trained to electrocute people with a car battery,” he says.

In the morning he waits outside the stubby brick psychologist’s office. He stands when she emerges an hour later, red-faced and tugging at the edges of her leather jacket.

Falling into step at his side, she jams her hands into her pockets and gives him a preemptive scowl. “Shut up.”

Sergio grins. “I hope that’s not the way you spoke to the psychologist-”

Anana comes to a dead stop and twists sideways to jab a finger at his chest. “You know I know how to kill you,” she says in a heated whisper, possibly afraid that a block away from the psychologist’s office is a bad place to _loudly_ threaten her partner with murder.

“You have two years, I have twenty,” he taunts, arching a condescending brow. “I like my odds.”

“Yeah? I kicked your ass twice the week we met, and that was _before_ I had your shitty-ass employer kidnapping me into their assassination club.”

He's noticed over the last half a year or so of having this conversation that she loves omitting the small detail of a giant fucking hole in his side, which, while it’s healed well enough, still means crunches sometimes misfire into muscle spasms almost as bad as getting stabbed in the first place.

“If I’d wanted to kill you-”

“They asked me why you didn’t. I told them it was because I was better than you.”

Sergio shakes his head in disbelief. “That’s such bullshit. You think they actually _believed_ that?”

“They did after a while,” Anana says, and he can tell from the uneasy flicker of her smile that something's not right. Her voice grows uneven. “You're welcome. For not telling them the truth.”

Anana's arms jerk just slightly, a twitch that stops when she clasps her elbows tight against her body. Immediately he stiffens: he _knows_ that reaction. Ilaria’s interrogators aren't kind, and at this point he's familiar enough with their modus operandi to have some idea what methods they'd used.

She'd thought she was protecting him. She'd thought she _could_.

He leans in and kisses the top of her head.

—

 _St. Germain_  
_Day eight_

He's dangling over the edge of an inner beam inside a bell tower while the psychopathic _child_ he'd massively underestimated bends down to pry at his fingers.

“Hey, bitch,” he hears Anana saying as he grips tighter, her furious voice coming from somewhere on the platform overhead. “ _Go to hell_.”

Amy looks up toward Anana and then her head snaps back in the echo of a shot: she drops like a rag doll, half her body slumping over the edge, nearly on top of him-

Anana shoves the body aside and grasps his wrists, grunting in pain from the effort of raising him enough that he can reach the platform's edge and finish pulling himself up.

He sprawls out beside her, chest heaving, listening to her over the blood pounding in his ears: _I've got you, you're okay, you're okay-_

“I want off this damn island,” he says, when he can finally manage to grit out the words.

Anana bends over and kisses him, hard and desperate. “I'm not letting you out of my _sight_ until we're gone,” she says in a low voice, letting him lean heavily against her as he struggles to sit up. “Fuck splitting up to cover more ground, we're both getting out of here _alive_.”

—

 _Boston_  
_Seven months post-St. Germain_

“The good news is she passed her evaluation,” Julia says, when the court appearances start again a month later.

“The bad news?”

The corners of Julia’s eyes crease. She pats his shoulder, and then takes a seat as the judge enters the room. “No bad news. Not this time.”

He watches Anana’s face as the psychologist declares her fit to raise a child, as the law guardian suggests there may be some benefit for Stephanie to be raised within her own cultural tradition.

The judge makes a pronouncement she wouldn't dare to make without the hefty weight of the world's most powerful organization behind her, not for an unmarried indigenous woman. She agrees.

“Congratulations,” Julia whispers. “Looks like you’re going to be a father.”

He wonders if she's got any idea how little he actually knows about what to do with that, or how he's even supposed to feel, but it’s probably not this vague unsettled thing in his gut that seems a lot like _fear_.

—

 _Seattle_  
_Three days post-St. Germain_

“I just wanted to let you know I passed the mother on to Ilaria." Julia settles onto a park bench next to Sergio. She hesitates like there's more she wants to say, and then closes her mouth.

“Everything good?”

“It's fine. Just Board politics.”

 _Just Board politics_ nearly tipped the planet into a dumpster fire, but if Julia wants to be tight-lipped he's not going to pry.

“There's something else,” Julia says after a moment. She passes him a medium-sized manila folder from her memo bag. He peers into the envelope, recognizing the familiar outline of traveling papers and a passport.

One job always leads to another.

“What do you want?” he asks through a stiff jaw. “You should know I've upped my rates. Hopefully you can still afford it.”

Julia tilts her head and purses her lips in a look somewhere between amusement and exasperation. “Are you going to look at it before you start accusing me of something?”

Mouth twisted tight, he shakes the contents of the envelope into his lap: a cursory glance reveals the passport and birth certificate are Canadian. Scrubbed work records: ex-military, and, randomly, wilderness search and rescue. Somebody in the assets-handling department is either getting bored or feeling creative.

He opens a cream-colored envelope and unfolds a letter printed on heavy cardstock. It's from the Board and finished with three signatures. He recognizes Julia's immediately, and then Max Kühn, head of Ilaria’s intelligence operations; the last belongs to the Executive Director, Claire Wallenberg.

Sergio skips back up the page and swallows sharply: _released from contract, ineligible for future recruitment or engagement with the Corporation; violation of this agreement by any internal party subject to punishment according to standards consistent with those set by the Corporation-_

He stares at the paper until it starts to blur.

_We own you, Serge. Next time you fancy turning domestic, why don't you contemplate what happens to people who steal from us. Maybe warn your next girlfriend, too. Tell her what happened to your last one._

“You didn't have to do this,” he says, voice thick.

Julia shrugs and leans forward, elbows on knees, and stares at some distant point across the park. “My mother waited _thirty years_ for someone to help her. Nobody did. Maybe I'm tired of history repeating itself.”

She looks over her shoulder at him and smiles; soft lines crease the corners of her eyes, one of the only signs she'd once been at the tail-end of her thirties. “Take care of yourself, Sergio." She rises and shoulders her bag. “If you'll excuse me, I have another promise to keep.”

He sits there long after she goes. Freedom’s supposed to make a man feel light, but it's the heaviest thing he's ever carried.

_You can be the man you want to be and not the man they made you._

He doesn't know where to begin.

—

 _Boston_  
_Seven months post-St. Germain_

In the late afternoon they pick up Atuat from social services, bewildered and crying. “I know, sweetheart,” Anana says, bouncing her lightly on her hip. “You don't remember me, but I remember you.”

Sergio doesn't know how to be a father. Driving back to their apartment with a wailing toddler in the backseat’s probably not the best time to say it, but out of all the people he's pretended to be, he's never had to be somebody's _dad_.

“I'm scared too,” Anana admits, pressing a hand against one side of her face. “I _took_ her from the only family she's known-”

“ _Don't._ ” He tightens his grip on the wheel. “Don't compare yourself to Hatake, or to _me_.”

She looks out the window. It's dark already, a northeastern summer on the fast descent to fall. Silence fills the car; in the backseat Atuat’s gone quiet, passed out from the high-energy effort of crying.

“You're not the only one who wonders if they're too broken,” Anana says at last.

“You are _not_ broken." He reaches his right hand blindly toward her in the dark, eyes on a sharp curve in the road. “Little cracked, _maybe_.”

He feels her fingers take his, tightly, like he's some lifeline. For months he's watched her fight with everything she has to be here, to stitch her life back together, and it never once occurred to him that underneath her unswerving conviction she might be afraid to _win_.

He drives one-handed the rest of the way.

—

 _Arctic Bay_  
_One year post-St. Germain_

In midwinter Sergio climbs the hill overlooking Arctic Bay to see the northern lights. Atuat rides on his shoulders, mittened hands occasionally drumming his skull through the hood of his coat.

 _Papa_ , she says as punctuation to her fists, beating him over the head with the word. Anana trudges alongside them and tries not to laugh. “Don't hit your father," she says, giving Atuat’s leg a tug, and Sergio a rueful look when Atuat reacts by giggling.

His beautiful girls. He doesn't deserve them.

Anana still has hard days. Sometimes even the way he moves across a _room_ is enough to lock her in a memory, to leave her leaning against a wall and struggling to breathe. If she can forgive him for that, if she can say he's a different man despite how blood never washes out and neither will his training, perhaps he can be forgiven. Perhaps he can be something new.

At the top of the hill Anana pushes back her hood and looks out over the village to the endless ice and ribbons of green and blue light beyond it. She tilts her head up toward him, cheeks red and lips chapped, and smiles when he meets her eyes. “It's a beautiful view," she says.

It is.

—

  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> I just, fuck. Fuck these kids. They really did a number on each other's lives so fucking extreme it actually physically pains me. I hope they live long lives of having each other's backs and squabbling over the best ammunition for hunting caribou and polar bears, that they raise their kid like she's a goddamn miracle, that they find _peace._
> 
> Also... for a story about a toddler I realize there's very little actual toddler in it. I do have access to twenty-two-month triplets, but kids are weird, my dudes. A lot of sub-language communicating, yelling, shrieking at the top of their lungs, giggling, banging things together, chewing on things and leaving the half-chewed remnants on, in, and under the upholstery, slobbery fingers, being held and yelling about not being held, and smiling like you're the BEST THING IN THE WORLD, THE BEST, and they just discovered today that you're the best because they've got no concept of object permanence and yesterday doesn't exist. I can describe what kids in this age range are like but I cannot write them. For one thing, how do you write about kids and get across why people love them without it being the fakest thing ever? How do you describe their smiles like they're in on your joke (you've got no clue what joke) and they just keep laughing and laughing until you sort of lose your self-respect and let them crawl on you and hit you in the face? It's hard enough to write convincing normal adults without writing adults under the influence of sleep deprivation and cute, horrible toddlers. That's why there's very little toddler content in here. I rest my case.
> 
> Anyway, there you have it: I think I've worked my big giant fuck youuuu to canon out of my system, so maybe I can start going to bed on time and relearn what walking in sunlight feels like. Thanks for reading!


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